1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:03,630 So my name's Emma Smith, I'm at Hertford College in Oxford, 2 00:00:03,630 --> 00:00:09,570 and the research I'm doing at the moment is actually research into Shakespeare via a particular book. 3 00:00:09,570 --> 00:00:17,670 It's the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, The First Folio, which was published after Shakespeare's death in 1623. 4 00:00:17,670 --> 00:00:23,460 And what I'm interested in, I'm actually less interested in things that people have been interested in about this book before. 5 00:00:23,460 --> 00:00:28,200 So previously, people have wanted to know how did this book get printed? 6 00:00:28,200 --> 00:00:31,710 How far does it represent Shakespeare's intentions for his plays? 7 00:00:31,710 --> 00:00:36,180 How far can it tell us about how the plays were performed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period? 8 00:00:36,180 --> 00:00:41,970 They're really interesting questions, but I I'm more interested in is what do people do with this book after it was printed? 9 00:00:41,970 --> 00:00:51,090 I'm interested in a history of reception and the way we understand Shakespeare at different historical times in light of the recent year project. 10 00:00:51,090 --> 00:00:56,010 Why is it so important that Shakespeare becomes digital? And why should we study the First Folio? 11 00:00:56,010 --> 00:01:01,040 We've just done a project to digitise the Bodleian copy of the First Folio, 12 00:01:01,040 --> 00:01:05,940 and we wanted to do that because actually the first of all is not a particularly rare book. 13 00:01:05,940 --> 00:01:09,810 There are more than 200 copies, but it's such an important book. 14 00:01:09,810 --> 00:01:13,560 We wanted to make it available. The Bodleian copy is very damaged. 15 00:01:13,560 --> 00:01:17,850 It's been read a lot. And one of the interesting things about it is you can sort of see which players were popular 16 00:01:17,850 --> 00:01:21,660 and which plays have been because some bits of it are very worn out and some bits aren't. 17 00:01:21,660 --> 00:01:26,160 But we wanted to make that available for people to look at because partly 18 00:01:26,160 --> 00:01:29,820 because the Bodleian got a duty to make books available to people to look at. 19 00:01:29,820 --> 00:01:36,210 But if a book is so damaged and so valuable that it's it's hard for people to have access to it, 20 00:01:36,210 --> 00:01:38,880 it seems a great way to do it, to have this digital copy instead. 21 00:01:38,880 --> 00:01:44,790 So we've got a really high quality digital copy freely available for people to reuse the images and stuff. 22 00:01:44,790 --> 00:01:52,800 And that enables you to look at all kinds of stuff. I mean, both the text, the plays, what's actually being said, but also what the binding is like, 23 00:01:52,800 --> 00:01:57,930 what you can learn about the way books were put together by the sort of physical copy of the book. 24 00:01:57,930 --> 00:02:01,590 And the reason the First Folio is interesting is for most of the half of the plays. 25 00:02:01,590 --> 00:02:05,970 But this is the only copy. All other copies come from this one. So this is the one copy we've got. 26 00:02:05,970 --> 00:02:13,110 We've got no manuscripts by Shakespeare. We've got a certain number of plays in print, in individual copies during his lifetime. 27 00:02:13,110 --> 00:02:19,320 But the first of all, it gives us plays like Macbeth, like Twelfth Night, like The Tempest, which you wouldn't have if you didn't have that book. 28 00:02:19,320 --> 00:02:26,970 So most of the plays from this whole period have been lost and we would have lost all these ones if they hadn't been gathered together in this book. 29 00:02:26,970 --> 00:02:35,790 So that's important. And the other thing that's really important about it is this is a copy of the plays before editors have got hold of them. 30 00:02:35,790 --> 00:02:43,440 And editors do really useful job in our modern editions of Shakespeare in that they make things clearer, they make certain things easier. 31 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:47,550 They put in stage directions, they standardise what characters are called. 32 00:02:47,550 --> 00:02:54,720 And so they give us an easier experience. And it's very hard for anybody to read the First Folio as their first introduction to a play now. 33 00:02:54,720 --> 00:02:56,520 But if people are studying the play, 34 00:02:56,520 --> 00:03:02,220 sometimes stepping back into the First Folio and looking at a version which doesn't have lots of explanatory stage directions, 35 00:03:02,220 --> 00:03:07,890 you realise what the editor has done has made an interpretation that it's not a fact that something happens at a certain point. 36 00:03:07,890 --> 00:03:12,070 And you can think, well, what if that character hasn't left the stage, if they're still there? 37 00:03:12,070 --> 00:03:17,580 That is a great example. At the beginning of King Lear, there's no exit for Edmund, the [INAUDIBLE] character, 38 00:03:17,580 --> 00:03:23,940 to leave the stage while King Lear and his daughters are talking and doing the love test and dividing the kingdom. 39 00:03:23,940 --> 00:03:28,740 And most editors will say, well, he's left. But it's actually really interesting for the rest of the play if he's just there completely 40 00:03:28,740 --> 00:03:33,540 quiet watching this going on and then using it as he plots later on in the play. 41 00:03:33,540 --> 00:03:38,460 So just just more things, small things like that. The Folio, Romeo and Juliet has no prologue. 42 00:03:38,460 --> 00:03:42,420 So all that two households, both alike in dignity in Fair Verona where we lay, are seen. 43 00:03:42,420 --> 00:03:48,960 That's not in the folios to all the things about the kind of fated or predestined aspect of the tragedy. 44 00:03:48,960 --> 00:03:54,000 You don't actually get in that text. So if you read it like that, it's completely it's completely different. 45 00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:59,370 You don't necessarily know. The prologue is a great spoiler, and that's that's interesting in itself. 46 00:03:59,370 --> 00:04:05,370 But if you don't have that spoiler, there are lots of ways this is a play which seems a bit like a comedy in certain ways. 47 00:04:05,370 --> 00:04:11,460 Maybe it could turn out comically. And that's more possible, I think, in the Folio than it is in most modern text. 48 00:04:11,460 --> 00:04:16,080 So there's loads of stuff to find out. It's a very, really refreshing way of looking at Shakespeare, 49 00:04:16,080 --> 00:04:22,230 which is why I think I'm really pleased that it's available for people to look at and browse through your research into the First Folio. 50 00:04:22,230 --> 00:04:25,890 Do you think that that brings you closer then to the Elizabethan original? 51 00:04:25,890 --> 00:04:31,890 Some of the research I've done on the Folio certainly has brought me closer to the first people who read the book. 52 00:04:31,890 --> 00:04:38,190 So there are lots of copies which have annotations and marks in them which help us understand. 53 00:04:38,190 --> 00:04:43,200 If you read this book, if you if you're one of the first buyers, first an early adopter of Shakespeare's First Folio, 54 00:04:43,200 --> 00:04:47,190 if you bought it in the sixteen twenties, what did you make of it? What did you think? 55 00:04:47,190 --> 00:04:52,620 Why were you reading it? What did you get out of it? Some of the annotations give us a sense what people are getting out of it. 56 00:04:52,620 --> 00:04:56,250 And some people are getting, as you would expect, lots of people, people get different things out of it. 57 00:04:56,250 --> 00:05:00,050 Some people are going through for almost a kind of private. 58 00:05:00,050 --> 00:05:08,780 Of quotations, which we call commonplaces, which is the way that you pull out beautiful or poetic or pithy sentences or phrases, 59 00:05:08,780 --> 00:05:12,600 probably with the idea that you might be able to use them in your own writing some later points, 60 00:05:12,600 --> 00:05:17,750 or some people are really going through commonplaces and we can see that they're doing that because they're writing in the margin, 61 00:05:17,750 --> 00:05:21,740 the heading love or kingship or something that they're going to put it under. 62 00:05:21,740 --> 00:05:23,720 They're sort of extracting and cataloguing. 63 00:05:23,720 --> 00:05:29,030 At the same time, some people are going through and getting a sense of how plots work and kind of what's happening. 64 00:05:29,030 --> 00:05:36,410 And some people are going through quite carefully changing errors or slightly reworking or improving bits and pieces. 65 00:05:36,410 --> 00:05:40,850 So I definitely feel that you can be closer to readers of Shakespeare. 66 00:05:40,850 --> 00:05:47,570 I think it's a bit of a myth, although it's a very attractive myth to think you get closer to Shakespeare in some way. 67 00:05:47,570 --> 00:05:51,560 I mean, this is a sort of the whole raison d'ĂȘtre of the Folio is that Shakespeare is 68 00:05:51,560 --> 00:05:56,420 dead and that in some ways it's quite an elegiac or definitely posthumous, 69 00:05:56,420 --> 00:06:00,650 literary, posthumous, but sort of metaphorically more elegiac kind of a form than that. 70 00:06:00,650 --> 00:06:04,520 So you think that some of the plays are influenced by commonplace books? 71 00:06:04,520 --> 00:06:10,640 Is that why Shakespeare is so quotable? I think people have always found Shakespeare to be quotable. 72 00:06:10,640 --> 00:06:17,810 And certainly when people read in the 16th, the 17th century, that was their main way of reading to pull out quotations, 73 00:06:17,810 --> 00:06:26,120 not necessarily to read synthetically or not necessarily to read for the plot or to read for themes and characters in the way that we might do now. 74 00:06:26,120 --> 00:06:32,690 So certainly Shakespeare's always been quotable in some ways. He's been quotable in different ways at different times. 75 00:06:32,690 --> 00:06:36,440 So, for instance, if you look at an early reading of Richard the third, 76 00:06:36,440 --> 00:06:42,560 which is underlining the phrases that are going to be taken out into a commonplace book, probably the most well-known quotation from Richard. 77 00:06:42,560 --> 00:06:51,350 The third now is a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse now no commonplace of the First Folio that I have seen underlines that phrase. 78 00:06:51,350 --> 00:06:57,710 And presumably that's because it's really hard to think of any context in your own life in which you would ever use that phrase. 79 00:06:57,710 --> 00:07:04,730 So the reason it's quotable for us is quite why it's something about the quotations are always both about the sound of them, 80 00:07:04,730 --> 00:07:07,310 I think, and the content and something about the rhythm of that. 81 00:07:07,310 --> 00:07:13,880 But early readers didn't find that quotable because they were looking for things which wouldn't really necessarily stand out. 82 00:07:13,880 --> 00:07:17,660 They were looking for things which could be taken from their context and put into different contexts rather 83 00:07:17,660 --> 00:07:23,150 than things that were so brilliantly on paraphrase a Bible that you would never do them differently. 84 00:07:23,150 --> 00:07:27,170 So I think quotations have been different at different points. But yeah, I think Shakespeare's always been quotable. 85 00:07:27,170 --> 00:07:32,090 So you suggested that 16th century readers weren't so interested in characters and themes, 86 00:07:32,090 --> 00:07:36,770 whereas nowadays that is what a lot of readers understand by Shakespeare. 87 00:07:36,770 --> 00:07:38,570 So why should we study Shakespeare? 88 00:07:38,570 --> 00:07:45,260 I think there are lots of reasons to study Shakespeare, and I think those reasons are not necessarily all the same for everybody. 89 00:07:45,260 --> 00:07:51,740 So I think there is a reason to study Shakespeare because one of the things modern actors have told us with their particular 90 00:07:51,740 --> 00:07:58,910 kind of psychological training into acting techniques is that Shakespeare writes characters who the modern period, 91 00:07:58,910 --> 00:08:06,680 the 21st century can understand as people with hidden motives and certain things that they don't articulate to themselves, 92 00:08:06,680 --> 00:08:11,070 but that you can sort of intuit from the way they are. So to characters like sort of like real people. 93 00:08:11,070 --> 00:08:14,480 So actors have told us about how you can put Shakespeare's plays on the stage. 94 00:08:14,480 --> 00:08:21,050 And that in itself is is interesting. I guess we can study Shakespeare to understand not so much to understand ourselves, 95 00:08:21,050 --> 00:08:26,780 which I guess is the model that lots of productions go for, but to understand something which is very different from us, very far away. 96 00:08:26,780 --> 00:08:34,010 So you can think about Shakespeare more historically, sometimes quite refreshing to think of Shakespeare as a 16th or 17th century writer, 97 00:08:34,010 --> 00:08:37,220 rather than to put the pressure on him of being a 21st century writer. 98 00:08:37,220 --> 00:08:42,860 And in some ways, that makes certain things about The Taming of the Shrew side, which is a play about gender politics, which is very problematic. 99 00:08:42,860 --> 00:08:47,420 Now, it takes a bit of the pressure off that play if you try and look at it historically 100 00:08:47,420 --> 00:08:51,620 rather than as a kind of timeless piece which tells of something ongoing. 101 00:08:51,620 --> 00:08:57,950 The reason I'm most interested in Shakespeare is because for a whole variety of reasons, 102 00:08:57,950 --> 00:09:05,420 some of which I think we don't even know, Shakespeare has become the kind of symbol of literature in English. 103 00:09:05,420 --> 00:09:08,930 And if you trace what people have said about Shakespeare, 104 00:09:08,930 --> 00:09:13,730 you can sort of understand you can use that to articulate quite an interesting sort of sense of intellectual history, 105 00:09:13,730 --> 00:09:20,570 how people have how people's aesthetic tastes have changed, how what they're looking for in what they read has changed over time, 106 00:09:20,570 --> 00:09:24,170 how the things they want to believe about a figure like Shakespeare have changed. 107 00:09:24,170 --> 00:09:33,470 So actually, as my work on the First Folio is a good example of this, I'm less interested in Shakespeare, the man and Shakespeare the creative genius, 108 00:09:33,470 --> 00:09:36,290 and I'm more interested in Shakespeare, the product of the book, 109 00:09:36,290 --> 00:09:41,660 or the idea that people took far away from Shakespeare's own period and did their own thing with. 110 00:09:41,660 --> 00:09:42,920 And why did they do that? 111 00:09:42,920 --> 00:09:50,660 What was it about those texts which allowed them to feel that they could rework them or live within them in certain kinds of ways? 112 00:09:50,660 --> 00:09:55,550 For some people cite Shakespeare, sheer productivity as a reason to study him alone. 113 00:09:55,550 --> 00:09:59,380 Yeah, that wouldn't be if you looked at Shakespeare in his historical context. He's. 114 00:09:59,380 --> 00:10:04,270 Writing for a theatre which has a big appetite for new plays, lots of writers, 115 00:10:04,270 --> 00:10:08,500 Thomas Middleton would be a good example, rights as much or perhaps more than Shakespeare. 116 00:10:08,500 --> 00:10:18,040 So it's not really the volume. I don't think. I think it is the ongoing history of these works so that they are both historical works, 117 00:10:18,040 --> 00:10:24,760 but they're also continuous works in the major players have continued to be written about and performed pretty much constantly. 118 00:10:24,760 --> 00:10:31,540 And therefore there are sort of index of how our culture has literary culture or dramatic culture has changed over that period. 119 00:10:31,540 --> 00:10:36,880 And is there a work of Shakespeare that you find most compelling? Don't think there really is a work of Shakespeare. 120 00:10:36,880 --> 00:10:44,680 I find most compelling. I tend to find once I get into any play, you know, I've become really into it and I can see all kinds of things about it. 121 00:10:44,680 --> 00:10:50,530 So I think my favourite is always the thing I'm reading most hard at that one time. 122 00:10:50,530 --> 00:10:54,310 And what would you say to those who challenge the authorship of Shakespeare's work? 123 00:10:54,310 --> 00:10:59,140 I'd say, well, it doesn't really matter, does it? I think it would build such a thing to get a heads up about. 124 00:10:59,140 --> 00:11:03,430 I think academics get very cross about people who don't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. 125 00:11:03,430 --> 00:11:08,620 I do think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I don't particularly care whether he did or didn't. 126 00:11:08,620 --> 00:11:15,250 And I certainly don't find it quite as much of an affront to everything that I stand for when people challenge that, 127 00:11:15,250 --> 00:11:16,600 even though I think they're wrong. 128 00:11:16,600 --> 00:11:22,210 One thing about people who challenge Shakespeare's authority is often they're extremely knowledgeable about a very, very narrow set of things. 129 00:11:22,210 --> 00:11:27,100 And it's sometimes it's a bit of a shame that they don't put that energy towards something which will be more productive. 130 00:11:27,100 --> 00:11:31,340 But I mean, I could give a long reason why. Shakespeare, why why do we know Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? 131 00:11:31,340 --> 00:11:36,940 But plenty of that out there on the Internet and the people who don't think he did will never believe that he did whatever you say. 132 00:11:36,940 --> 00:11:40,360 But it's pretty much for the most part, that's a conversation which happens elsewhere. 133 00:11:40,360 --> 00:11:44,620 Part of the work I'm doing on the First Folio is about people who have doubted that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare in. 134 00:11:44,620 --> 00:11:47,950 One of the things that is really important in the 19th century is a lot of 135 00:11:47,950 --> 00:11:51,370 particularly people who think Francis Bacon wrote these plays get preoccupied with 136 00:11:51,370 --> 00:11:55,840 the idea that the folio is a code and that everything about this precise spelling 137 00:11:55,840 --> 00:12:00,010 and punctuation and layout on the page is actually a code to be broken. 138 00:12:00,010 --> 00:12:03,910 And when when you break the code, it will say Francis Bacon wrote me or something. 139 00:12:03,910 --> 00:12:08,800 And there's lots of work to try and do that. And I think as a phenomenon, that's really, really interesting. 140 00:12:08,800 --> 00:12:14,020 And it's not that different from the people who think Shakespeare's work is coded 141 00:12:14,020 --> 00:12:18,520 with references to Catholicism or even more even more mainstream than that, 142 00:12:18,520 --> 00:12:25,600 people who think that it is worth spending ages and ages on the specific detail of Shakespeare's language in any way at all. 143 00:12:25,600 --> 00:12:30,890 I mean, to me that more more on a continuum, I think, than people would like to believe. 144 00:12:30,890 --> 00:12:35,320 I mean, perhaps that's because Shakespeare's work is quite cryptic in many ways. 145 00:12:35,320 --> 00:12:39,970 The sonnets in particular, I think Shakespeare's work is ambiguous. 146 00:12:39,970 --> 00:12:45,040 I suppose the idea that Shakespeare's work is cryptic suggests if only we could bring the code, 147 00:12:45,040 --> 00:12:48,400 we would be able to work out exactly what these things meant. 148 00:12:48,400 --> 00:12:55,180 And I suppose I think poetry generally and Shakespeare specifically is not sending as a code in that way. 149 00:12:55,180 --> 00:13:03,250 So I think sonnets are, - sonnets by lots of writers are quite mysterious because they hover between the apparently personal 150 00:13:03,250 --> 00:13:09,940 and the apparently public and they hover between the conventions of the form and the way individuals might write within it. 151 00:13:09,940 --> 00:13:17,620 That is quite puzzling. And they tend because they're so compressed, they tend to keep hitting one note, like one word or a variation on a word. 152 00:13:17,620 --> 00:13:22,630 And whenever you repeat a word over and over again, you start to think, does this mean anything? 153 00:13:22,630 --> 00:13:29,260 Is this what the word is? And that's one of the real techniques I think Shakespeare uses in his sonnets to draw us into a kind of internal world. 154 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:32,080 I don't think they refer to things outside themselves. I suppose that's what I mean. 155 00:13:32,080 --> 00:13:39,950 And one question that that I get is about ten such in-depth readings of his work. 156 00:13:39,950 --> 00:13:45,190 I think it's impossible to know what he intended and therefore kind of irrelevant, 157 00:13:45,190 --> 00:13:51,500 because I think the question that brings up a lot to me is an English graduate and there as a teacher is what's the point? 158 00:13:51,500 --> 00:13:56,470 Surely he can't have meant as much as my English teacher is saying that he meant I suppose I don't think 159 00:13:56,470 --> 00:14:02,170 of any writer that what they say about their work is necessarily the most interesting thing about it. 160 00:14:02,170 --> 00:14:06,160 And certainly it's not the total of it. I don't think that writers understand that. 161 00:14:06,160 --> 00:14:08,590 I don't think they have a particularly privileged understanding of their work. 162 00:14:08,590 --> 00:14:12,460 And I would say that even about modern writers that you might hear sometimes if you go and 163 00:14:12,460 --> 00:14:16,480 hear a modern writer at a literary festival or in a bookshop talking about a book they wrote, 164 00:14:16,480 --> 00:14:20,560 which you have read, that the book that they wrote does not quite seem to be the book that you read. 165 00:14:20,560 --> 00:14:25,510 That's the point of reading, really. So even where we know what the authors think that their books are about, 166 00:14:25,510 --> 00:14:32,620 I think as readers we can disagree with that and certainly with Shakespeare when we have no idea what he intended from his writing. 167 00:14:32,620 --> 00:14:37,210 The whole point is if we were tied to what he had intended, even if we could know what that was, 168 00:14:37,210 --> 00:14:40,060 we would have exhausted these plays 400 years ago, wouldn't we? 169 00:14:40,060 --> 00:14:44,380 What's interesting about Shakespeare is really us that we keep changing and therefore we see a 170 00:14:44,380 --> 00:14:49,450 different kind of version of ourselves or a different set of concerns in Shakespeare's work. 171 00:14:49,450 --> 00:14:52,750 And what's amazing about Shakespeare's work, and it's hard to know quite why it does that, 172 00:14:52,750 --> 00:14:56,370 but it's been able to hold up that mirror all kinds of different places. 173 00:14:56,370 --> 00:14:59,200 So I don't think I do think Shakespeare does intend all these meanings. And I think. 174 00:14:59,200 --> 00:15:05,260 In some ways, our ability to interpret them is a measure of the creativity Shakespeare inspires in other people. 175 00:15:05,260 --> 00:15:06,723 That's not all for himself.